On Now (Finally) Owning A Vectrex

Well, this was supposed to have come out much sooner, but was held back for a number of reasons. One being, of course, that the mail service decided to be late in delivering the thing to begin with -- it only got here just this past Monday. And then there was the time spent actually playing it, the time spent on the side playing Atari, Game Boy, etc... But hey, at least I got around to it eventually, right?

Anyway, here's the post I'd promised earlier. The unboxing of the Vectrex itself, my "reviews" of the games that came with it, and some bits and bobs of information sprinkled (see: globbed) here and there. It's a bit long and picture-heavy, so I'll put all that stuff below the break.

So, without further stalling for time or baiting people into viewing this blog, I'll get right into it. The pics are a tad on the big side, and since Imgur won't work for Fimfic anymore, I can't do that resizing thing. So, just click on the thumbnails if you want a bigger picture.

It's not really a vacuum. It's a box for one, but, it's not.

I'll be honest, even though I was chomping at the bits just to finally get this thing, I felt oddly composed when I finally did get it. Guess I was just saving my enthusiasm or something. Then again, I knew full well I had to proceed carefully. This thing is clearly marked as "fragile" after all.

Packaging material... my mortal enemy.

The games (and extra controller box) taken out, still bubble-wrapped. Fun!

It's nice to see that everything was packed away all nice and tidy in there. Protected quite well, too. It appears as though everything was intact, so despite the sluggish delivery, at least they were being careful with it.

Ooh, what do we have here?

One thing I noticed is that the Vectrex is a bit bigger and weightier than I expected. Not that I really care or anything like that, but, it was an interesting thing to note. The unit itself probably weighs around fifteen to twenty pounds, if I had to hazard a guess. Not exactly "portable", even though it technically is a portable self-contained system. The very first, even.

It was packed a little too well, I found. Bubble wrap and masking tape galore... Clearly, this calls for some extreme measures.

And there she is. The Vectrex Arcade System, as proudly emblazoned on the top and bottom of the unit. It was a little dusty in the little nooks and crannies, and the screen was due for a bit of cleaning, but for something that's over thirty years old? It's in remarkably great condition. As you can tell, the Vectrex has a built-in vertical CRT monitor, modified to display vector graphics as opposed to typical pixel graphics. A cartridge slot is visible on the side, where one can insert the carts for the small but quality library of games. It's a completely self-contained unit, with a small cord and plug running out near the underside, so all you need to do to play is simply plug it in, unmount the controller from its place on the front of the unit just underneath the screen, and turn it on.

Left: The Vectrex finds a home just beside my computer screen. Right: The controller, undocked from the Vectrex and ready to play.

Of course, it eventually came time to make sure the system worked, above all else. Not just work, period, but work well, as sometimes you'll come across a faulty unit. Booting up the system by turning a small knob in the controller bay (which, incidentally, also functions as the unit's volume knob), the telltale buzzing sound was audible. It takes a good few seconds for the system to start up, where it shows you a "VECTREX" bios screen and plays a short, but memorable three-note tune that's long since wormed its way into my mind. Though there was a slight audio issue at first, with sound being fickle and barely working, it's since gotten better and now works perfectly; I've looked it up, and audio seems to be a common issue with these things, but using them regularly again alleviates the problem. I imagine it just needed some time to "warm up", so to speak, after such a long period of disuse and the possible frigid temperatures it had to endure on its trip here. The buzzing is really the only issue -- a result of the lack of shielding between the CRT and the wiring -- but it's not anything I'm worried about it. It adds to the charm, if you ask me.

I didn't even open any of the games that came with it by this point, but I didn't really need to. The Vectrex has a game built right into the unit, called MineStorm. The game boots up whenever you turn on the system without a cartridge inserted. Normally, a Vectrex would have sold with a special color overlay for MineStorm (more on the overlays in a bit), but this one did not come with one.

Pardon the poor quality of these game pictures. It's difficult to get a good picture from a Vectrex display...

In simple terms, MineStorm is an Asteroids clone. An impressive 3D effect greets you as the game starts, an ominous tune playing as a spaceship flies into the distance and vanishes -- but, not before littering the screen with deadly mines, represented as (initially) harmless dots. You then appear onscreen, able to fly around and shoot as these mines start to "activate", the dots turning into spiky three-pronged objects and then floating around. When you shoot one, it is destroyed, but then two more smaller mines will activate. From those two, another four will appear when both are destroyed. You also have the ability to utilize a "warp drive", which teleports you to a random point on the screen, though this is risky as you can end up accidentally teleporting into the path of an oncoming mine. It's a slight twist on the Asteroids formula, but it proves strangely fun and quite replayable.

Later levels will throw more diverse types of mines at you. One type, once destroyed, with fire a small burst of energy in your direction, which will obviously kill you on touch. Luckily, those bursts can be shot and destroyed as well, or else you can simply avoid them. They are easily identified by having a dot in their center. Another type is a four-pronged mine that will follow you relentlessly, and the smaller versions spawned when it is destroyed only chase you faster. Yet another type is some unfair and unholy amalgamation of the two, mines that chase you AND fire back at you once they are destroyed. It gets very hectic very quickly, forcing you to develop quick reflexes and create strategies on the fly to avoid and properly destroy these mines, level by level.

From left to right: Spike, Space Wars, Spinball, and Berzerk.

As great a game as MineStorm is, I still have eight more left to play. All of them are CIB (meaning "complete in box", a term used for describing complete game sets with the game, manual, and box, and tend to be the most desirable and pricey), and though a couple of boxes look to have seen better days, all are in presentable condition. The game boxes themselves are made of typical cardboard, and are pretty big; they had to be, in order for the included overlays to fit in them. The cartridge itself, however, is actually quite small. Smaller than most cartridges that were available at the time.

A typical Vectrex cartridge. This one is for Berzerk.

Vectrex overlays were unique to each game, providing color for the screen and even explaining which buttons do what.

Speaking of the overlays earlier, these things are probably the neatest bit about the system. They are colored plastic sheets that you could place over the screen, similar to how some old arcade games (Star Castle comes to mind) had similar overlays to compensate for the lack of color produced by the screens. A color Vectrex was being developed, and a prototype is said to still exist in the wild, but it was dropped due to how expensive it was to produce. While the overlays aren't explicitly necessary to plan any of the games, I find that they are a nice addition, and offer a nice cosmetic bonus to the game and unit itself. I mean, come on, they just look so cool with the screen in place.

Berzerk is my next game of choice, given how it's among my top favorite arcade games, so I figured it would be interesting to see how well it holds up on the Vectrex. For those that don't know Berzerk, I can try to sum it up as such: you are a Humanoid, stuck on a planet of robots. You are also trapped in an endless maze, full of deadly yet incredibly stupid robots. You run from room to room, shooting robots and doing your best to run away from Evil Otto -- the relentless ball with a smiley face that bounces after you with endless determination, wanting nothing more than to squash you into the floor. Repeat the shooting and running ad infinitum until you die, racking up a huge high score in the process.

In a nutshell, that is Berzerk. And it is amazing.

And boy, is it HARD. The difficulty is quick to ratchet upwards to the point of being nigh-impossible. It was originally an arcade game, though it was ported to the Atari 2600, 5200, Atari 800 computer, and of course, the Vectrex. An excellent Commodore 64 version was developed by fans just a few short years ago, and it is most definitely worth trying out as well. (It's free, after all. Probably even superior to the original version.)

Evil Otto is relentless.

I've heard others say that this is the worst version of the game out there. And you know what? They're right.

...That doesn't make it bad, though. Not in my opinion. It's still a fantastic game, and it holds up quite well in vector-graphic form. The screen is prone to a lot of flickering and the game slows down quite a bit when there's a lot of robots onscreen, but it's nothing that bothers me to any significant degree. Hell, the slowdown is actually a bit of a godsend in some cases, giving you more time to react to enemies and plan out your movements. I've heard that this version of Berzerk is buggy, but so far, I've yet to encounter anything game-breaking.

Oh look, now it's mocking me. Will I never be good enough for you, Berzerk?

An unfortunate omission is the unique voice synthesis that the arcade version was well known for. Phrases like "Intruder alert! Intruder alert!", "The humanoid must not escape!", or "Chicken! Fight like a robot!" have been burned into the minds of players. It's not THAT big of a deal that they're not included, but it's something I find odd, considering that another game, Spike, happens to feature voice synthesis as part of its gimmick. Why couldn't the same have been done for Berzerk?

Nowadays there is a hacked ROM file of Berzerk called "Verzerk", which utilizes the VecVoice or AtariVox+ add-ons to almost perfectly replicate the voice samplings of the original arcade version. I don't personally own any of those, and have only played it via emulator, but it's a welcome touch to a good version of an amazing game.

Waka waka.

Clean Sweep is the next game I tried out. There's not a lot to say about it, beyond the fact that it's clearly a Pac-Man clone, and that it has a bizarre premise. Namely, that you're in a bank, money is strewn about the halls (as represented by the dots), and all you have to reclaim it is a vacuum. The catch is that your vacuum can only hold so much money at once, so once you're full, you can't pick up any more. You have to then deposit all the money you collected in the center of the bank, the vault, before heading out to get more money.

Naturally, you aren't going to be doing this task peacefully. Bands of robbers (represented by... pincer-things? I have no idea) will soon run into the bank from outside, and chase you down. Much like the ghosts in Pac-Man, you have to avoid them. And also like Pac-Man, you have a way of fighting back. At the four corners of the bank are special open rooms. Entering one will supercharge your vacuum, thus allowing you to suck up the robbers entirely for a limited time. However that works, I will never know. What the heck kind of bank is this, anyway?

Overall, it's a unique game that does something a bit different from Pac-Man, but manages to be fun in its own way. It's a bit slow-paced and doesn't speed up much more over the course of the game, but that's fine by me, honestly. A second game mode amps up the difficulty significantly by rendering the walls of the maze invisible, leaving only the trail of money to guide you -- though if you don't pay attention, you'll easily end up wandering helplessly in the dark, a perfect target for the wandering robbers that have no trouble finding you wherever you may be.

"I didn't sign up for this shit."

I find that I keep falling back on "unique" as my go-to compliment for these games, and Spike is yet another example of such uniqueness. At its core, it's a rather simple platforming game that plays sort of like an extremely simplified Donkey Kong, minus the constant barrage of barrels and fireballs. Playing as the titular character of Spike, you're off to save your sweetheart Molly from the Designated Bad Dude Of The Week (not his real name btw, I just made it up), and you do that by grabbing the key to her cage on each level and reaching her without falling down or getting hit by any enemies or obstacles.

The game's main gimmick, as I mentioned earlier and which was proudly advertised on the box itself, is the voice synthesis technology. It's primitive and strange-sounding, but amusing in a way, serving to lend a bit of personality to the brief cutscenes between stages. Plus, you gotta love how Spike shouts "DARNIT!" at you whenever you mess up. Admittedly, Spike isn't a terribly exciting game, gameplay-wise, but it's definitely an interesting display of the Vectrex's sound capabilities.

Pictured: the shattered remains of my ship. The CPU can be brutal at times.

Next, we have Space Wars. It's War... in Space! What a concept. It's a very simple game, really; you either play against a CPU opponent in a 1v1 space battle, or play against a friend in the 2 player mode. The mode versus the CPU is fun for a bit, but as with most multiplayer focused games, it's a lot more fun and replayable when you have someone to play against. Duking it out with the computer gets a bit old after a while, once you've tried out all the game variants, and realize that the CPU is hilariously inconsistent -- sometimes ramming itself into the sun and dying instantly, or chasing you down like a hawk and killing you before you have a chance to blink. Fun in small doses, and a joy in multiplayer, but don't expect a phenomenal single-player experience.

There are a few other games I also have and spent quite a bit of time playing, but I won't go into extensive detail on them right now. Rip Off is a game where you protect your collection of fuel cells from scavenging pirates, and supports a two-player co-op mode. Hyperchase is a racing game where you have to reach the end of the course as fast as possible, or get as far as you can without losing all your lives in the alternate game mode. Spinball is basically a virtual pinball machine. And Blitz is... a football game. (Nothing more to be said, there.)

I've had the Vectrex for only a few short days, and it's already become the centerpiece of my collection. Even if I only play it for a short while, I just love booting it up and hearing it buzz and hum. There's a strange magic to it, I find. Or maybe I'm just batty. Either/or.

It's a shame that it didn't get very much attention. Despite some strong marketing and distribution, GCE's entry into the video game market couldn't have come at a worse time. The video game crash of 1983-84 all but killed the system outright; a system priced initially at two-hundred bucks was slashed to fifty or lower, with games being as cheap as five bucks a pop. The system enjoyed some popularity outside of North America in Europe, and there was a limited release in Japan as well, but the Vectrex didn't catch on. The system that boldly claimed itself superior to Atari and Intellivision ended up sharing a grave with them, and so many others.

Of course, in recent years, interest in the Vectrex has been steadily increasing again. An active homebrew community has been producing some excellent games for the system over the years. A lot of which are available to buy in cartridge form, with a select few even having custom-made overlays. I plan on getting a few myself, actually. Though many of them are clones of arcade games (Vectrexians = Galaxian, Vector Pilot = Time Pilot, Patriots = Missile Command), they are very well-made clones, to be sure. With prices rising and demand for the system mounting, it's nice to know that it's still getting some love from the community in the form of new content to play with.

Should you get a Vectrex for yourself? I'd personally say yes, but with the added caveat that these things are getting rarer and pricier, so you'll have your work (and your wallet) cut out for you. Harder to collect for than, say, an Atari, or a NES. Or Genesis, even. Most old consoles in general are probably easier and far cheaper to collect for, really...

An addendum: Classic Game Room has a review of the Vectrex, plus reviews for many of the games available. I'd recommend checking them out, as it does a great job of showing these things in action. Probably better than what mere pictures and words can describe, anyway...

I imagine this won't be the only blog I'll write on the Vectrex, or on retro games in general. I've been toying with the idea of doing proper reviews and spotlights on games and systems that could use a little more love and attention, and that you guys just might possibly be interested in. Maybe. It's a thought, anyway. I love all the modern-day games and consoles as much as any other person, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to step back in time for a bit.

"I don't get it."